Science

In response to growing complaints of racial bias among its users, Airbnb will beef up its nondiscrimination policy, do more to diversify its own workforce and offer implicit-bias training to its hosts, according to a report released Thursday after a three-month review by the company.

But the short-term rental site will not, for now, concede to critics one of their chief requests: abandoning the user photos that make it easy to identify online who is a minority.

"After thoroughly analyzing this issue, I came to believe that Airbnb guests should not be asked or required to hide behind curtains of anonymity when trying to find a place to stay," Laura Murphy, a former...

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In response to growing complaints of racial bias among its users, Airbnb will beef up its nondiscrimination policy, do more to diversify its own workforce and offer implicit-bias training to its hosts, according to a report released Thursday after a...

To the editor: Back during the first term of George W. Bush, a prescription drug program became part of Medicare.
Despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party and others, Medicare was not given power to negotiate prescription prices with drug...

The woman suspected of drunkenly smashing her car into the 15-month-old son of MMA fighter Marcus Kowal in Hawthorne was rearrested Wednesday on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, days after the boy was removed from life support.
Donna Marie Higgins,...

For some of the drunk drivers, speeders and red-light runners of Orange County, the most powerful person to know wasn’t a judge, a prosecutor or a defense attorney. It was a low-level paper pusher who rarely saw the inside of a courtroom, authorities say....

When the Sony Walkman went on sale in 1979, music was stored on a cassette tape, power came from AA batteries and sound traveled through headphones plugged into a 3.5-mm audio jack.
Nearly 40 years later, smartphones double as personal audio players,...

Robots need rides, too. Enter the Mercedes-Benz “Robovan.”
Starship Technologies, maker of squat six-wheeled robots that deliver packages to businesses and homes, said Wednesday it is working with Mercedes to develop a van to transport eight of the...

Seen from a different angle, Jupiter looks like a whole new world.
After flying within about 2,500 miles of the planet’s cloud tops on Aug. 27, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent home unprecedented images of Jupiter’s north pole, revealing a stormy...

Eduardo De La Riva, a Maywood city council member, said he warned his colleagues that an engineering firm they were considering hiring might have been booted out of South El Monte because of questionable practices.
De La Riva said he heard from someone...

Just in time for scientists to declare 2016 the hottest year on record, scientists at Stanford University have developed a material that could make the coolest clothes ever — shirts and pants that block the sun’s warming rays while venting body heat...

Mountain lions living in Greater Los Angeles could be at risk of extinction within the next 50 years if the population remains isolated by freeways and other forms of human development, UCLA and National Park Service wildlife ecologists are warning.
...

How long has life flourished on our planet?
A new study suggests it could go back more than 3.7 billion years.
In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of Australian researchers describe small conical structures that may have been built by...

Federal wildlife authorities on Tuesday said that a review of genetic tests has led them to conclude that the coastal California gnatcatcher is a valid subspecies and therefore worthy of protections that have barred development on tens of thousands of...

It’s the coldest case in science, and it may have just been cracked.
Forty years after researchers discovered Lucy, an early human ancestor who lived 3.2 million years ago, scientists think they now know how she died.
After examining high-resolution...

Our future robot overlords never looked so squishy. A team of scientists led out of Harvard University have managed to build an entirely soft robot — one that’s inspired by an octopus.
The octobot, described this week in the journal Nature, could...

Why is it that some people crave several cups of coffee a day while others stop at only one or two?
A growing body of evidence suggests that the amount of coffee we consume is determined by our genetic makeup rather than the amount of sleep we got the...

Believe it or not, there are upsides to getting older.
Yes, your physical health is likely to decline as you age. And unfortunately, your cognitive abilities like learning new skills and remembering things is likely to suffer too.
But despite such...

With freewheeling summer months behind children and school and organized sports just ahead, new research offers some sobering news about the potential for long-term cost when a child’s brain is hurt.
In a study that tracked the life trajectories of...

A tiny, unseen force could potentially alter our basic understanding of the universe — if it really exists. Theoretical physicists at UC Irvine say they’ve found evidence for a fifth fundamental force of nature, carried by a particle that until now has...

You can get a pretty good idea of a country’s wealth by seeing how much it shines at night — just compare the intense brightness of China and South Korea to the dark mass of North Korea that’s sandwiched between them.
But nighttime lights don’t tell...